Saturday, July 3, 2010

Most ridiculous AGW study of the week

Press release 7/2/10: "Previous studies have shown that reducing carbon dioxide emissions to zero would not lead to appreciable cooling, because carbon dioxide already within the atmosphere would continue to trap heat. For cooling to occur, greenhouse gas concentrations would need to be reduced. “We wanted to see what the response would be if carbon dioxide were actively removed from the atmosphere,” says study coauthor Ken Caldeira of Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology. “Our study is the first to look at how much carbon dioxide you would need to remove and for how long to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations low."

The Carnegie simulations of "scrubbing the atmosphere" of deadly CO2 (using technology that doesn't exist) shows that for every 100 billion tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere, average global temperatures would drop a whopping 0.16° C (0.28° F). And "further simulations showed that in order to keep carbon dioxide at low levels, the [imaginary] process of extracting carbon dioxide from the air would have to continue for many decades, and perhaps centuries, after emissions were halted."

Global CO2 emissions are 32 billion tons/yr

Thus, for the fictitious payback of 0.16°C of global cooling, all CO2 emissions would need to come to a complete halt and unknown technology developed to remove the .0389% CO2 content in the atmosphere at a rate more than double the current global emissions, for "perhaps centuries".

Let's get to work on that right away

{And we'll need to make sure the huge, unknown, global CO2 scrubbing technology can run off of solar power since otherwise it'll probably emit more CO2 than it scrubs.}